A method of said type is known from practice. In particular such a method is known for driving an incandescent lamp, in which the driver comprises a triac, which is connected in series with the lamp and an alternating voltage source. The triac is controlled by a control signal which determines a phase of each period of the alternating voltage at which the triac is made conductive. If a current through the triac decreases below some threshold the triac will stop conducting. This type of driver is well known from its use in homes.
For some years now it is a trend to control its state, that is the amount of energy supplied to it, from a remote controller. Several lamp devices can be connected to such remote controller by a data communication line and to a mains supply source by mains lines. The remote controller can control the state of the lamps contained in on or more lamp devices. In this way one can build a large lighting system with remote control of lamps of different lamp devices with few wiring for control and mains supply.
Light systems of the above type are known from practice. Several protocols, such as DMX and DALI, are known to transfer data from the remote controller to a device controller of each lamp device. In particular, data to control the energy state of a lamp comprises 8 bits. Therefore a light output of a lamp can be controlled in 255 steps to 256 different light output levels of the lamp. Such data can be determined by a lighting scheme which is programmed in the remote controller, or it can be instructed from a manually controllable control device at a distant from the remote controller mentioned above.
When the amount of energy supplied to an incandescent lamp is changed it will take some time to attain a new steady temperature which is associated with the changed amount of energy supplied to the lamp. Therefore, when changing said amount of energy a person will not notice a step like change in the light output of the lamp.
When using a lamp with a faster response to a change of the amount of energy supplied to the lamp a person may notice a step like change in the light output of the lamp, in particular if said change of the amount of energy supplied to the lamp spans several of said 255 steps at a time. This can be annoying for the person.